[whatwg] <a href="" ping="">

[dolphinling]

http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#ping

| User agents should allow the user to disable this behaviour, for
| example controlled by a setting that also disables the sending of HTTP
| Referrer headers. If the behaviour has been disabled, UAs may either
| ignore the ping attribute altogether, or selectively ignore URIs in
| the list based on the user's preference (e.g. ignoring any third-party
| URIs).

This sounds slightly wrong to me. "If it's disabled, UAs may choose to 
in fact only disable part of it."


| For URIs that are HTTP URIs, the requests must be performed using the
| POST method. User agents must ignore the entity body returned, but
| must honour the HTTP headers — in particular, HTTP cookie headers.

Should be changed to "must ignore any entity bodies returned", to deal 
with redirects.

What happens if I do ping="ftp://ftp.example.org/file"? Would the UA 
download that file? Perhaps something like:

| Authors should use only HTTP URIs. User agents may ignore any non-HTTP
| URIs.

is in order?


| When the ping  attribute is present, user agents should clearly
| indicate to the user that following the hyperlink will also cause
| secondary requests to be sent in the background, possibly including
| listing the actual target URIs.

Is this necessary? I would leave it entirely up to the UAs rather than 
saying they SHOULD do it.


| Note: ... but authors are urged to use the ping attribute so that the
| user agent can .

Perhaps this sentence should be ended? :)

-- 
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>